I am not too fussed about remakes. There are so many games to play, I don’t have enough time.

But, one game I would instantly get, Panzer Dragoon Saga. What an absolutely legendary game, that hardly anyone had the chance to play. Cleaning that up and releasing it on modern platforms would be amazing.

Using the rather fittingly named Dracula theme. Fantastic darkmode theme for qbittorrent

https://draculatheme.com/qbittorrent

You will be happy to know there is online for every game in that collection.

Trailer for it here - https://youtu.be/Hl0D5FK3a50

Power stone and PS2 are both coming out next year in Capcom Fighting Collection 2.

When I was looking at replacing my phone, I was considering an iPhone. But the major thing that stopped me was the lightning port.

The other major thing now is Firefox. It is simply better on android than iOS. It is by far the most used app on my phone, and not being able to use the extensions I do on android is a significantly worse experience.

I also really like my current phone, it has a marvelous bit of technology called a 3.5mm headphone jack and is amazing.

No he is talking about his own roughly 48km² area.

Ignoring the fact that the earth is just slightly larger at 510,064,472 km²

They are great for what they are and definitely have their place. But they are expensive and pretty mediocre in comparison to something like my KBear KS1s which are around £20, or £140 cheaper than the Openrun Pros I have.

I love them(I am on my 3rd pair), and I reach for them more often than the in ears. They are super comfortable and easy to listen too, they allow you to hear stuff around you as long as you don’t crank them up too loud, and the battery lasts ages(I got about 13 and a half hours of music out of them in a day).

In terms of audio quality, they arent great, listenable but the bass is fairly bad and the highs are thin. Mids, especially voices are pretty great though. So if you listen to a lot of podcasts they are fairly easy to recommend, music is not their strong point.

I cycle a lot, like a silly amount. So not having my in ears blocking sound is always good. I also suffer a lot from wind noise which can give me really bad headaches, which having the Shockz on helps reduce, and the music eliminates the headaches. This is why I love them so much, they are basically essential to me on rides, espcially when doing long ones. You can wear them all day listen to music and hove converstions with people without turning the music off.

I also like them when just out and about in normal every day situations, because I can keep tabs on things around me while enjoying music. This doesnt really apply if you are commuting on a busy bus or train, or it is really loud around you they kinda suck at that point. Because you probably have to turn them up too loud to drown out the environmental noise, and that can cause them to vibrate on your head which really isnt good or comfortable.

In terms of recommendations, if you cycle, run or walk a lot in nature(rather than cities) I would definitely encourage someone to try them. If you also hate wearing in ears I would recommend trying them as well, but keep in mind the audio is not great due to nature of the tech behind bone conduction.

I would not really recommend if you like blocking out sounds(commutes, noisy office, busy city streets), or you are looking for great music audio quality.

I am very minimal with what I carry.

I always have phone, headphones (either wired earbuds or my shokz bone conducting ones) and the least amount of keys(this is currently down to a single key on a small elastic cord).

If I am cycling I add in a small cafe lock, and in the summer I include spf30 Chapstick as well.

That is all the stuff ever really worry about taking with me on a daily basis.

This analogy is so bad, it is not even close to what is happening.

I will try and adapt to cars for you(I dont know why), but this is just really really bad.

Say you have designed a car, you can produce them on a very small scale, but you have come to valve(they make cars now) to mass produce. They do so, for a 30% cut(that reduces the more they sell) for everything they sell from their direct sales at the price you have set. There is no material costs or labour costs, just that cut of the price you have set.

Now valve have a sales page and are selling, and you decide that actually I would like more people to see the car, and so you consider selling it at other dealers. Valve says, sure, you can even have the cars for free from us(no 30% cut) and you can have basically an unlimited supply of free fully built cars to sell else where. We only ask that you sell the car at the same price you have set with us if you are selling a car we made.

You want to go sell it new cheaper? You are more than welcome too, but you cant sell the car we produced.

Such a bad analogy, but that is closer to what is actually happening.

Just think about how this works.

Steam currently allows you to generate keys and sell them for free, only stipulating that they must be sold for the same price as on steam.

Let’s say they are told that stipulation can’t be enforced.

Valve, will probably go with 1 of 2 options.

1 - you can no longer generate keys. So all the great key sites(GMG, Fanatical and so on) no longer exist, because no steam keys.

2 - Valve charge an upfront fee for keys generated. Now smaller pmdevs and publishers can no longer supply keys to sites, because they can’t afford the upfront costs.

What incentive does valve have to continue offering this free service? If it can be exploited for the detriment of steam, they will stop providing it.

Phone tech is really boring. Almost everything looks the same, they are all x% faster than last year’s model which still does everything perfectly fine. In terms of hardware, the phone has kinda reached the optimal place.

I’m not the target audience for bleeding edge phones though. I take photos, listen to music(using Bluetooth and wired headphones), browse the web and message people. I don’t really play games or use it for work.

By far the most interesting thing to me is foldable phones. I really like the idea of a flip phone, but I don’t think it would be too happy sitting in my sweaty pocket while I cycle.

Trust me, you could absolutely follow the example of other drivers and use your phone while driving.

Similar set up for me. But 21:9 is my desktop, so discord, web browser, anything that is lower quality. Then my 16:9 is my gaming and high quality content screen.

This is because my 21:9 monitor is a bit older now, and a 144hz VA panel, and I hate it for games. My new 16:9 is an OLED and 240hz and it is absolutely gorgeous. I also mostly play fighting games, so anything more than 16:9 is just black, well in the case of the VA panel grey and a bunch of light bleed.

Paige NO!

They keep throwing around threats of leaving.

Do it… do it you absolute chickens.

Pretty sure he means a deluxe edition upgrade as a mtx.

Where some games allow you to get the base game, try it out and upgrade if you want. Rather than diving in at the deep end and not knowing if you’ll enjoy the game.

So for fighting games, character passes are a good thing(overall).

If you bought SF4 at launch and continued to play the game throughout it’s life, you ended up buying the same game multiple times. This was essentially a few characters and a balance patch(had new mechanics as well). This the fragmented the player base a lot, so if you were playing the base game you couldn’t play with someone on the latest version.

Street Fighter 5 however, switched to character passes and even being able to unlock characters with in-game currency(difficult if you came to the game later but possible). This means everyone got the balance patches and major system updates, so the player base stayed as a single entity.

For a niche genre, this is significantly better than multiple purchases of the same game, and allows for a game to get more updates over a longer time.

However I do wish they kept in more unlockable content like costumes, colours and stages.

Specific to Street Fighter 6 though, they have a battlepass(which is not good, but isn’t terrible either) which the free version gave/gives out a bunch of character rental tokens, so you can play with DLC characters you haven’t purchased.

Still playing Street Fighter 6 pretty much everyday. Looking at who to try and get Master rank with next.

Learning Tekken 8, but complete scrub at 3D fighters so taking it slow and trying out a bunch of people.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink is my current non fighting game time sink as well. Absolutely loving the game, the quality of the combat and character variety is fantastic. Although definitely would have enjoyed more variety in the end game.

I am going to respectfully disagree, I think if you have a desire to learn and participate everyone can have fun online in fighting games. Don’t get baited by thinking that you need to learn all these combos and moves and be 100% perfect at doing it all the time. Cause you dont.

The difference between someone just starting and a pro is vast, and will seem daunting and like you need to know a bunch of stuff. But honestly competitve starts out similar to you and a bunch of pals just having fun together.

You are playing the other person, getting reliable damage from a combo is more important to begin with than doing optimal damage. For street fighter(it is what I have the most experience with), you need to know how to anti air to stop people from jumping(this is usually a crouching Heavy Punch, but can be different for some characters). Then throw in a simple combo, can be an easy target combo(or using the modern inputs in SF6) or something as simple as HP > Fireball/Tatsu. And then making sure you know basics like blocking and throws, drive impact and drive parry for street fighter 6.

That seems like a lot, but it is less than the mechanics of most single player games that get thrown out in tutorials, and the rest of the knowledge will come with time and practice. Say you come across someone who just cleanly wipes the floor with you, you can look at the replay and see if there is a gap, or learn the timings, or if it is unsafe if you just kept blocking. But that won’t be something you have to worry about for a while. You will spend a lot of time figuring out how to handle people randomly throwing out DP or Drive Impact or who just won’t stop jumping.

So, like you I don’t enjoy most competitive games. I like to dabble occasionally and enjoy an FPS here or there(I enjoyed the Finals for a bit, and occasionally a CoD, last one was Modern Warfare), but mostly play single player or co-op games because I find them far more enjoyable.

There is one genre that is an exception, fighting games. I fucking love them. I used to enjoy them as a kid, then had a long hiatus, dabbled when Street Fighter 4 launched, but didn’t “git gud”. Then Dragonball Fighter Z and the Arcade Edition for Street Fighter 5 launched and I think they were the gateway drug for me. Street Fighter 5 was tough, I couldn’t find a character I liked, so kinda bounced off it, but DBFZ kept me in. It wasn’t until Blanka in SF5 came out that it all clicked for me.

The genre starts of like a little puddle, you don’t really need to know a lot going in, but you definitely need to want to improve. And the more you improve the more you realise how deep the puddle is, cause it is actually an ocean. When you play against another human, at the lower ranks it is quite random and spammy. But as you get past them, you get to where you can condition people, you can learn their habits and combo choices. Then you take that knowledge and adjust your gameplay and see if they can counter it, and it can be come a big back and forth of trying to get the other person to make a mistake and exploiting their habits.

It is also a genre where nothing else really transfers across. All that time in FPS or RTS games isn’t going to help, so learning to do the technical inputs can be rewarding, or labbing out a combo and how to implement it in your gameplay.

I also really enjoy the ranking climb in most fighting games. SF6 has kinda perfected it, you play 10 games and it gives you a placement from Rookie upto Diamond 1, then you match against someone typically within ±1 rank(Gold 1 would be matched with Silver 5, Gold 1 or Gold 2)and rack up points. At the top of the ranking you hit Master, then it turns into Elo points and a proper distribution of skill, cause the difference between a professional and good player that just hit Master is massive. And for SF6 it is done on a per character basis, which allows you to sink time into every character and be playing with people your skill level.

I am 417 hours into SF6, 3 characters at master rank and a few in diamond/platinum. I still feel like I am bad, and I am definitely not using all the systems effectively in the game. But I sure as hell am excited to sink another several thousand hours into this game over the life of it.

Tekken 8 also just came out, which also seems incredible, but 3D fighters are basically an entire new genre to learn.

Fighting Games are fucking cool.